2021: The year quick commerce took off

The quick commerce model is here to stay and will drive investments in the logistics sector servicing the need for dark stores, last mile delivery.

Monday December 27, 2021 , 3 min Read

Good Morning,

Amid the restrictions induced due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many avoided stepping out to buy groceries and other essentials. With more people now online than ever, this led to the exponential growth of quick commerce startups.

2021 saw online grocery and fresh produce delivery companies ramp up the ‘convenience factor’ with promises of 10-minute deliveries to keep consumers hooked.

Food delivery startup Swiggy had launched its grocery and essentials delivery service Instamart in mid-2020. The service, which currently delivers groceries in 30-45 minutes, is now targeting 15-minute deliveries by early 2022.

Operating in the same space, Bengaluru-headquartered Dunzo rolled out 19-minute delivery for consumables earlier this year, after receiving backing from Google Ventures and Lightstone. Grofers recently rebranded itself to Blinkit with capital from Zomato and announced that it will be shutting down all locations that it did not service within 10 minutes.

With massive capital inflow, better predictability, and multiple fulfilment centres have allowed these quick commerce startups to enter newer cities.

“Third-party players help quick commerce companies launch new cities faster. The potential for the sector is huge as the online players serve only one percent of the market,” S Lakshmanan, Vice President and Head of Fulfilment Services at Ecom Express, tells YourStory.

Click here to read the full story.

The Interview

With most companies that cross $1 billion in valuation being digital-first, cloud-native technologies will form the backbone for unicorns to scale up from India to the world as they gear up to ride the decacorn wave.

Myntra's Sudheer Tumuluru, DailyHunt's Jai Thomas, Microsoft India's Rajnish Malik, Builder.ai CEO Sachin Dev Duggal, and Darwinbox' Prithvi Raju Alluri discuss their cloud-native strategies for scaling from India to the world.

Editor’s Pick: Women in tech

A March 2020 NASSCOM report “India’s Tech Industry: Women For The Techade” says that women constitute 35 percent of India’s technology industry.

While women have made significant strides, a lot needs to be done to achieve gender equality in this space when it comes to women’s representation in key decision-making roles in tech-based companies. Read more.

Startup Spotlight

Upskilling students using vernacular content

With evolving dynamics of job requirements in the highly competitive market, students graduating from educational institutes are finding it difficult to find a job due to huge market requirements.

Hyderabad-based NxtWave aims to bridge the gap between college education and what the industry expects by upskilling students, mostly from Tier-II, III, IV cities, and making them employable in Industry 4.0 technologies. Read more.

News & Updates

Serial entrepreneur Pankhuri Shrivastava, who founded women-focused social community platform Pankhuri, passed away on Friday. Investors and others close to her mourned the untimely demise of the entrepreneur on social media, calling it a huge loss.

Managed healthcare platform Karkinos Healthcare has received an undisclosed amount of investment from Reliance Digital Health. Backed by Ratan Tata and the Tata Group, it has other major angel investors that include Kris Gopalakrishnan, Ronnie Screwvala, etc.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that vaccination against COVID-19 for children between 15-18 years will start from January 3, 2022, while "precaution dose" for healthcare and frontline workers would be administered from January 10.